A Tour of Piano Trios to Open the SBCMS Season

The Elixir Piano Trio: l-r Fang Fang Xu, cello; Samvel Chilingarian, violin; Lucy Nargizyan, piano.

REVIEW

Elixir Piano Trio, South Bay Chamber Music Society, Pacific Unitarian Church, Rancho Palos Verdes

DAVID J BROWN

Amongst the LA area’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of highly-skilled, professional chamber music ensembles, the Elixir Piano Trio (Samvel Chilingarian, violin; Fang Fang Xu, cello; Lucy Nargizyan, piano) seems to have passed me by—and to my loss, judging by their program for the first concert of the South Bay Chamber Music Society’s 63rd season, as ever under the Artistic Directorship of Robert Thies.

Drawing of Mozart in silverpoint, April 1989.

This amounted to a chronological mini-conspectus of the piano trio genre from the late 18th to the mid-20th century, but one that neatly side-stepped its most celebrated 19th century (male) names. The Elixirs began with Mozart, and the fifth of his six numbered trios. Composed in summer 1788 at around the same time as his last three symphonies, this Trio in C major, K. 548, despite the key signature’s cheerful implications and its opening measures resemblng a familiar jaunty phrase from an aria in The Marriage of Figaro, is emotionally unsettled and ambiguous.

The first movement exposition is bright-eyed and perky enough, but the development plunges into the minor, and in this performance the tendency to darkness was emphasized both by the Elixir Trio’s trenchant dynamic accentuation and their omission of the repeat. Indeed, the lack of repeats throughout made the work, at a tight, 16-minute whole, seem a very different animal compared with, say, one British period instrument recording where the inclusion of every repeat stretches it to nearly half-an-hour.

Clara Schumann in 1850.

The Elixirs’ dramatic drive was maintained in the next item, written more than half a century after the Mozart. Clara Schumann’s Trio in C minor, Op. 17, from 1846 bids fair to be regarded as the magnum opus in her slender output. Though it follows the familiar four-movement pattern of sonata-design opener, scherzo-and-trio, slow movement, and fast finale, there’s no sense of this being by rote. Rather, it seems the natural home for Schumann’s inspiration.

A long-breathed first subject shared between all three instruments, punctuated by a peremptory fortissimo figure, leads to the exposition's well-contrasted and rhythmically unpredictable second theme. Again the Elixirs did not observe the exposition repeat—and though this was in some ways regrettable, it did serve to emphasize the dramatic thrust of their interpretation, as they dug straight on into the development’s tensile pile-up of overlapping figures, before the lead-back to a full recapitulation.

By contrast, they took a relaxed view of the tempo di menuetto Scherzo—delightfully tripping in ländler-ish contrast to the serious first movement—and gave equal measure to the wistfully lingering Trio, before the Scherzo’s return. All three players relished the beauties of the Andante, beginning with the songful main theme, introduced on the piano and then passed successively to the violin and the cello. The Allegretto finale revisits the first movement’s vigor, and the Elixir Trio skillfully elucidated Clara Schumann’s teeming invention through to the dramatic end.

Rachmaninoff in 1892.

After the interval, they moved on another half-century or thereabouts to the one-movement Trio élégiaque No. 1 in G minor, composed in 1892 by Sergei Rachmaninoff when he was still under 19 years of age. Here they responded as expansively to his late-Romantic Slavic melancholy as they had tightly delineated Mozart’s and Schumann’s Classical structures in the first half, but with the caveat as usual with this piece that it sounds like the first movement of a larger whole—in other words, leaving one wanting more!

Gayane Chebotaryan.

A further leap of half a century brought us to another single-movement piano trio, this time from Western Asia, and written by a composer who few present, surely, would have heard of. Gayane Chebotaryan (1918-1998) was born and died in Russia, but spent most of her working life in her native Armenia, where she achieved considerable recognition. In the Elixirs’ idiomatic and committed account of her Trio for Piano, Violin, and Cello (1945), strains of folk melodies and rhythms certainly brought to mind her more famous countrymen Khatchaturian and Babajanian, and left one wondering if her other works are as immediately engaging.

Astor Piazzolla.

The final temporal jump, this time just a quarter-century, also swung us half-way around the world to Argentina and Astor Piazzolla. His Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas (Four Seasons of Buenos Aires), written between 1965 and 1969, seem to be getting almost as ubiquitous, both collectively and individually, as Vivaldi’s Venetian original, and comparably in as many arrangements.

The otherwise excellent (but sadly online-only) program notes by Saagar Asnani of UC Berkeley did not reveal whether the piano trio line-up for Otoño Porteño (Buenos Aires autumn) (1969) was Piazzolla’s own or by another hand. Either way, it can rarely have sounded as haunting and rhapsodic as this performance, led by Fang Fang Xu’s eloquent cello. 

 … and there was an encore: more Piazzolla, and one of his greatest hits—Oblivion, to really sound out the depths of Latinate melancholy, and to the huge appreciation of the South Bay audience. 

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South Bay Chamber Music Society, LA Harbor College 8:00p.m./Pacific Unitarian Church 3:00p.m., Friday/Sunday, 19/21 September, 2025.

Images: Elixir Trio: artists' website; Mozart, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, Piazzolla: Wikimedia Commons; Chebotaryan: Armenian National Music; the performance: author.

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